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My Linux Laptop ‘Klystron’ And 802.11n Again

The Linux laptop I name ‘Klystron’ has been running in a single session, for 1 day and 7 hours so far, and with its lid in the open position, and remained connected to my WiFi in 802.11n mode.

Further, the last time there has been any real issue with this mode, occurred several days ago, and several reboots ago. On the rare occasion where the connection simply quit while in use, there were error messages in my ‘syslog‘, that vaguely pointed towards an 802.11n problem, according to my having Google-d those error messages.

But the behavior was introduced more recently, that simply closing the laptop lid would cause it to lose contact with my WiFi, without the actual connection being reported as ‘down’ by ‘Network Manager‘, and without resulting in any error messages. This situation would typically reverse itself, within seconds of my unlocking an active session, and would also reverse itself, without resulting in any Notifications. The laptop would simply never know, that overnight, there was no data received and transmitted over WiFi.

Similar but not identical results were obtained, while connected in 802.11g mode.

Given that nobody has ever asked me the question, of whether maybe my WiFi signal could already be weak where this laptop is situated, I would say that it remains unproven, that this setup has any 802.11n issues per se. And so, because I know how frustrating it can be to do so, I would also not encourage coders to start looking for errors very carefully, which might not even exist in the software, or in the firmware.

You see I still have this peculiar notion, that there can be something impeding the efficiency of the actual WiFi antenna, which could account for most of the instability I have reported. And I also have this peculiar notion, that the performance of an antenna is based on wave dynamics, and not on the dynamics of Quantum-Mechanical particle representations, of radio signals.